Jewish Identities: Nationalism, Racism, and Utopianism in Twentieth-Century Music

Klara Moricz

Abstract

This book mounts a challenge to prevailing essentialist assumptions about “Jewish music,” which maintain that ethnic groups, nations, or religious communities possess an essence which must manifest itself in art created by members of that group. It scrutinizes concepts of Jewish identity and reorders ideas about twentieth-century “Jewish music” in three case studies: Russian-Jewish composers of the first two decades of the twentieth century; the Swiss-American Ernest Bloch; and Arnold Schoenberg. Examining these composers in the context of emerging Jewish nationalism, widespread racial theorie ... More

This book mounts a challenge to prevailing essentialist assumptions about “Jewish music,” which maintain that ethnic groups, nations, or religious communities possess an essence which must manifest itself in art created by members of that group. It scrutinizes concepts of Jewish identity and reorders ideas about twentieth-century “Jewish music” in three case studies: Russian-Jewish composers of the first two decades of the twentieth century; the Swiss-American Ernest Bloch; and Arnold Schoenberg. Examining these composers in the context of emerging Jewish nationalism, widespread racial theories, and utopian tendencies in modernist art and twentieth-century politics, the author describes a trajectory from paradigmatic nationalist techniques, through assumptions about the unintended presence of racial essences, to an abstract notion of Judaism.